Ready, Aim
by MooseSupremacy
Summary: In which Joshua obeys the rules for once and nobody is happy about it. (AU)(Implied JoshNeku)


A duel. Simple, in concept. Two people fighting in a specified form of combat, attempting to kill one another for a desired reason. It brings about images of gentlemen sparring for honor, glory, and respect. In modern times, such measures were barbaric as most matters could be solved by discussion.

The definition of the word doesn't accurately apply the emotions and experiences of the event however, as Neku discovered. Joshua had handed him a gun, a pistol, and told him that on the count of ten, they were both to fire. "The one who remains will be the victor." He said with a quirk of the head and a smile. At first, he had refused to participate in this idiotic and treacherous game of bullets, not accepting the steel device. It was only when Joshua physically set its cold metal surface into his hand that he had to comply. The shape was foreign to him, he had never held a gun before.

He begged Joshua, to please, reconsider and come to his senses. Neku implored him to just talk about this before either one of them did something they would regret. He even went as far as to grab him by the shoulder as Joshua strolled away. Pleading in a voice laced with more than just personal fear, but of something deeper. Neku was terrified of losing his own life and equally terrified of losing him.

"We're partners," he asked, "we're friends. Don't do this, why are you doing this?"_  
><em>

Joshua replied with a cool and quiet, "Let go of me."

As the fiery haired teen's hand fell from him, so too did his hopes that this could be avoided. He watched as the Composer calmly marched away from him, the same confidant arrogance as when he prowled the streets of the city.  
>When he was a decent distance away, approximately fifteen feet, he turned to face his proxy and announced as if he were speaking to an audience,<p>

"At the count of ten we shall both raise our weapons and fire upon each other. Whoever remains, shall be proclaimed the victor and whoever has fallen, shall be proclaimed remains."

He giggled at the last part, flipping the hair out of his eyes to better see the target. The target in question quaked, trying to convince himself that he was not going to shoot Joshua and that Joshua would not shoot him, that all of this was a lie. Pistol at his side, Neku's hands trembled.

_ "_One, two…" He began, sounding for all the world as if he was bored and this had no importance to him. "Three-"

Neku interrupted, "What the hell Josh, please just stop this, tell me what's going on?!" The Composer ignored him and continued on, "-four, five, six, seven-"

He heart pounded wildly in his chest, thrashing and beating with panic and fear. A choice most vile, whose life did he value more? It was hard to think, stress clogging his mind and thought processes, what should he do? What could he do? As the countdown drew to a close, he firmly shut his eyes. Neku didn't want to see this, he didn't want to see any of it. Nothing good could come of this.

"-eight, nine," there was laughter in his voice, "ten_."_

A shot rang out in the room, the sound of it echoing in the open spaces and lingering ominously. Neku was unsure of what he would see when he opened his eyes, if he could open them at all. The Scramble? His room? An empty void? Events passed in a blur, he was sure he was dead, though it felt strangely identical. When he dared to peek at his surroundings, the last thing he expected was the room they had been in, high ceilings, dull concrete, standing tense and frozen in the same position. His gun was warm and a casing lying on the ground next to his feet. Facing him was Joshua, weapon still raised.

Grinning smugly, the Composer had staggered backwards a few inches before regaining control. When he spoke, his voice was tight with strain. "Well done, Neku." The gun slipped to the floor beside him, as he clutched at the blossoming scarlet that now appeared at his abdomen. Joshua crumbled to the ground on his knees ungraciously, free of any elegance or poise that he usually held. Both hands pressed against the wound and breathing in with shaky gasps and out short, clipped exhalations. Neku let go of his pistol, it clattered on the concrete and he sprinted as fast as his legs could carry him.

This was wrong, everything was wrong. His stomach writhed and twisted like a malicious cobra, his insides feeling constricted under its wrath. No, this was not supposed to happen. It was perversely, treacherously wrong in all ways imaginable. Surreal was the only was he could think of it. As he reached the Composer, the blood had bubbled out from the injury and trickled between the gaps of Joshua's fingers. He dropped to the ground, steadying his friend who wobbled uncertainly.

Looking at him through lilac eyes, behind the curtain of pain that clouded them, Joshua seemed triumphant.

"Joshua," Neku gaped, "I-I didn't mean-I didn't think that-oh fuck." He felt helpless.

Joshua giggled, hoarsely. "Eloquent as always, dear". Neku was aware that he was crying, yet there was nothing to be done about it. He had just shot someone, someone he would consider a friend.

_ "_You could have taken the shot," Neku spat out wretchedly. "Why'd you let me?_"  
><em>

He panted, coherent words becoming a challenge. "Rules of t-the Game. One of us has to…" the word 'die' was left hanging in the air, unuttered. _  
><em>

"That's not what I asked, Josh." He said, pointedly quiet.

Joshua felt himself sag under a wave of exhaustion, raising alarm and concern in his friend, who tried to support him from collapsing completely. Had his body always felt so heavy, or was this a development from circumstance? His breathing sounded deafeningly loud to him, wheezing, ragged, trying to obtain air when it would not come. He had become aware that there was something warm around his shoulders but not of how it got there. It took him a moment to understand that he had slumped over, only to be caught and supported by his Proxy. Propped up in the grasp of his own subordinate, like some fragile weakling. He thought to himself, _How embarrassing._

"Hmm, well. I have my... reasons. And... you have people to… disappoint… now." A muscle on the side of his cheek twitched, implying the attempt at a trademark smirk. Neku could not believe what he was hearing, Joshua had let this happen, but at the cost of… Before he could properly form an appropriate answer, the Composer inhaled sharply and winced, back arching in pain. He blinked wearily, looking up to his friend with an almost patronizing expression. "Be kind… to my City… Neku._"_

Blood had ebbed through the faded purple shirt, dying it a stark contrast of crimson against his pale skin. His hands loosened on the bullet wound, slackening and allowing one to fall to his side, the other remained gently pressed over the injury. Neku glanced anxiously at Joshua, whose eyes were open a sliver, they had become focused on some distant point. They remained that way.

The death of the Composer, he recalled in deliberately neutral hindsight, was incredibly anti-climactic. Joshua's chest rose and fell, until it stopped. There was not a choir of angels singing in heartbreaking welcome, there was not an orchestral swell of the infernal ensemble, there was not even a dramatic last word or sigh from the ruler of the Underground. He simply breathed and his heart pounded laboriously in his chest until it did not, and then he was no more. In a sick twist of fate, the only detail that stood out was a small one. Joshua's gun, the one he had previously shot Neku with before that started this whole ghastly affair; when it landed on the floor, the cylinder opened. There was a single bullet in a different chamber. The other metal five openings stared at him hauntingly, like empty eyes of a skull. He had never intended to fire.

Neku felt ill, sick to his stomach. An ambient form of nausea remained in the background whenever he and Joshua shared the same room, yet it wasn't necessarily unpleasant. This was nowhere as benign as that. As his own clothes had acquired a similar color to them, painted with the slick blood of the fallen Composer. So he sat there, for a moment, drenched in the rapidly cooling essence of his friend, holding a vacant corpse and unsure of what there was to do. He had never wanted anything more than in this moment, he wanted it all to be a lie. When a terrible ringing filled his ears, it did not affect him as it once would have, as he was still too numb from what had just occurred to care much about anything. The room shook, feeling as though the world may begin to crumble at any moment, as if it hadn't already. Perhaps a piece of the room had fallen and struck him upon the head, causing him to lose consciousness. Perhaps the space the room occupied, in some interdimensional space, had closed in on itself due to the loss of its ruler. Whatever the case may be, he was unconscious for a sizable amount of time and when he at last awoke, he wasn't sure that he wanted to.

He sat up in his bed, a semblance of normality restored in what seemed to be a miracle. Neku knew better. Miracles are seldom given freely. He was alive. He was at home. His family did not recall that he had died. They didn't know what happened to so change his personality, or who these new 'friends' of his were, but they were grateful for it. When he and the gang met at Hachiko, the Game was not discussed. They noticed a change in him as well, though he was sociable and amiable to a degree in their company, he was also silent. No one mentioned the Composer, either out of fear of what the answer would be to the question _What's wrong?_ or out of respect for Neku.

Time passed, life progressed. People stopped wondering why Neku's behavior had shifted so radically. All they knew, was that it happened around the time a newspaper article had been published. They suspected that it made him realize how wondrous life was, and that he should be grateful. The paper had been released the day after he awoke in his bed, with memories of the sticky, cold blood that had once adhered to his skin but was not his own. He could still feel it too, the weight it added to the short sleeve shirt, the slight tightness it caused his skin to feel as it bared the impression of drying in caked, globular layers. How still the air had seemed, in disbelief itself. Without the liquid drum to mete out the rhythm, that steady _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum _it was stagnant, motionless. The feeling would not leave him, the tacky residue under his nails and in the creases of his palms.

Details. Horrifying details that wouldn't leave his mind, that his brain wracked with and replayed over and over, over and over, a thousand, a hundred times in the span of a minute.

The article was glanced over by thousands, then discarded. It was not even a cover story, only a small few paragraphs on the back page of the news. Titled plainly, **Young Man Dies, After Five Years. **When Shiki read the article, she cried. Beat was quiet for the first time in known history. Rhyme watered up and handed the story back to Neku, sadly. He tried to read the information again, to absorb details, but the heaviness and pressure building in his chest prevented him from getting past the first two sentences. For the introduction line had caught them all by the throat,

_"After a five year long battle, the son of prominent bank owner Yuuta Kiryuu, died at 12:03AM last night, from an_  
><em>internal hemorrhaging. He was admitted to the hospital five years previous, after a suicide attempt caused him to be<em>  
><em>in what appeared a permanently comatose state. A witness of the attempt says, that the then fifteen year old<em>  
><em>"Joshua" Yoshiya Kiryuu jumped from the roof of the six story apartment complex he lived in at the time.<em>

_No news yet on how this is affecting the family, though a witness who prefers to be remain anonymous disclosed_  
><em>information saying, quote 'His folks couldn't care less about him when he was alive, they're probably glad this<em>  
><em>happened, so don't have to pay money to let him rot in a hospital.'<em>

_The cause of the hemorrhage is unknown and being investigated currently."_

In Shibuya, nothing drastically changed, as Neku suspected another Composer had been elected or won, or however they get into power. People marched like soldiers of consumerism in the streets by the shops, businessmen and women hurried about in the frantic rat race of corporate life. Kids played by the statue of the famous dog and bought the newest 'hip' records and had fun. Life proceeded as it does, on a grand scale.

What was different, was that there was a new obelisk in an unkempt and largely abandoned cemetery which bore a familiar name. Against a few of the other stones, were decaying remnants of things once offered or brought to the memory of the person that lay below. Pictures, money, food and other miscellaneous goods. Yet on this newly erected monument, a strange assortment of things sat along or on the tomb. One was a dark colored plush cat, another was what appeared to be a necklace in the shape of a skull, a few decorative pins were put along the edge. And finally, a pair of purple and black headphones draped partially over the marble marker.

On a grand scale, yes, Shibuya was the same. Some streets and alleyways though, were calloused by the absence of a ruler who would walk among their asphalt rivers. Whispers erupted in quiet places, in between buildings and in the spaces of walls. A feeling of unknown emptiness as if the shades of a pleasant dream eroding with mornings glare. The city, _His_ city, carried on. But only after a backwards glance at a diminishing outline of some figure both distant and familiar, towards a fleeting specter of recognition. A group of teenagers wondered what it would have been like to have been normal. What the city would have felt like. What the world would have felt like.

One in particular, wondered what it would have felt like, to not have a patchwork heart; a heart that was broken, then mended, then broken again, and then at last replaced with an aching maw in the shape of a forgotten melody written by a beloved Composer.

* * *

><p><strong> Obituary<strong>_: By Sanae Hanekoma_

_ Most people know me, or at least know of me, as a wisecrackin', advice giving guy at the café. For the most part  
>that's true, I guess. I know I have a lot of canned sayings that get tossed around like a motivation hacky sack or<br>something. But not this time. Not this time._

_I don't know what the folks reading this are expecting me to say, probably along the lines of "Josh's in a better place_  
><em>now." or "He'll live on in our hearts forever." or some other BS saying that is supposed to give the living comfort.<em>  
><em>Well, sorry to let you down, readers, but this article isn't heartwarming drabble, it's the truth.<em>

_ He was a quiet kid, not the loud, brash little punk that he made himself out to be. He was ignored unless he did  
>something that his parents, if you want to even call them that, disapproved of. Was treated like a freak and a<br>burden for pretty much all his ambulatory life, and after he was out of commission people still thought poorly of him,  
>wondering why he wasn't dead. <em>

_ A lot of people think that what his dad did, keeping him 'alive' was a kindness. That's a crock of crap and I know it.  
>When you have a life like that, pushed to the point where you just want to be done with the whole affair, it's not a<br>kindness anymore, it's out of spite. Josh was technically dead a long time ago, his pop just wanted to keep what was  
>left of his husk still breathing so he could use it as a sympathy bait. <em>

_ I heard the announcement like everyone else did, that he'd died after 'a long battle'. It wasn't a battle, it was a  
>siege from the inside out. You keep a guy alive against his will, and when he finally gets what he was after, you call<br>it a 'battle'? Whoever wrote that was laying it on thick, I'll bet three cups o'joe that he was paid off by Josh's pop. _

_ I'd like to consider myself his friend, though he'd probably think of me more as a caretaker or babysitter. But all the  
>same, I feel really damn privileged to have known the guy, even if it was for a short time. <em>

_ For the life of me, though, I'll miss him. But I'm not selfish enough to say that I wish he was still alive, because  
>after five years of struggling he finally got what he was after. I do wish that I could go back in time and beat the<br>ever lovin' junk out of the people who laid the traps for him to fall into. The ones who thought he owed them  
>perfection just because they shared the same last name. <em>

_ Five years ago, man, that seems like a long time. I feel older than I already do, now. Ambulances were how I could  
>tell something was wrong, five years back. He didn't tell me what he planned on doing, he was always too smart for<br>that. Didn't leave any clues or even hint at what he had in mind. The cars rushed past my place with their flashy  
>lights and blaring sirens. Then they rushed back off to the hospital. What I didn't know at the time was who they<br>were transporting, but I still felt sorry for whoever it was. Part of being a water sign, can't help it. _

_ Do you remember what it was like, when you were fifteen? It's a rough time for all of us, y'know. A few of  
>my least favorite memories come from when I was around Josh's age then. But what's more, is that you're still<br>only a kid. A freaking kid. A kid who has God knows how many other things to do and see, and experience and live,  
>and even that isn't enough to keep you from jumping off a building and breaking your skull open on the pavement. <em>

_ Don't know what else he'd want or expect me to say. He wasn't an angel, in a manner of speaking, and he wasn't a  
>worthless burden. <em>

_ He was a human being. _

_ But I guess that wasn't enough for some people. _

_I guess it was too much for him._

_ The WildKat is going to be a little  
>quieter with the stupid puns and snarky comments absent now. I'm going to find myself expecting to see him<br>waltzing into the shop for a while, I think. _

_ J, hope your whiny ass is happier now. You sure as hell deserve it. Miss you, kid. _

_ -S. Hanekoma. _

* * *

><p>~~~~~~~~Author's Note:<p>

+Edited for a few minor grammar/spelling errors, though there are still probably tons+

Apologies, if it's a bit of an unpleasant and grizzly read, this is my first story on here and I'm still trying to get a feel for it. Thank you all so much for reading, I appreciate it greatly.


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